The Trump-hating media have pounded White Home press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders for her “unfortunate misstatement” (as presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway put it) on Fox Information Sunday that some three,700 “known or suspected terrorists” have been caught on the U.S.–Mexico border. Actually, these “special-interest aliens” embrace terrorists, individuals who have lived or traveled via terrorist hotbeds, and others whose whereabouts set off nearer scrutiny when getting into the U.S. This quantity consists of individuals apprehended on the border, however primarily at airports and different places.

Trump’s detractors have used this dustup to suggest that if there usually are not three,700 ISIS killers in Tijuana pole-vaulting into San Ysidro, then terrorists have to be as uncommon there as polar bears. This echoes the phrases of former U.S. consultant Robert Francis O’Rourke (D., Texas). He claimed final yr that “precisely zero terrorists, terrorist groups, or terror plots have ever been connected with the U.S.–Mexico border to do harm to people within the United States.”

Actually, terrorists have been caught on the southern frontier, together with some who have been conspiring to rustle their comrades throughout the border and others intent on committing mayhem towards People. As PolitiFact defined: “It also looks to us like authorities have foiled every known plan.”

Janet Napolitano, Obama’s homeland-security secretary, testified on Capitol Hill in July 2012 that terrorists enter America by way of the southern frontier “from time to time.” So, we’ve that going for us.

Obama himself recognized this drawback whereas he was a Democratic senator from Illinois. As he stated on the Senate flooring on April three, 2006, “because we live in an age where terrorists are challenging our borders, we simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked.”

Based mostly on journalistic sources and unclassified authorities data, listed here are a dozen militant-Islamic terrorists snared or detected on the U.S.–Mexico border or caught making an attempt to breach it — alone or in cahoots with others.

• Mahmoud Youssef Kourani scored a visa by bribing a Mexican diplomat in Beirut. Kourani and one other Center Easterner then secured a Mexican information who escorted them north. Kourani entered America in a automotive trunk in February 2001. He ultimately settled amongst Lebanese immigrants in Dearborn, Mich., the place he raised cash for Hezbollah. Kourani pleaded responsible in March 2005 to giving materials help to terrorists.

• Adnan El Shukrijumah was “a green-card holder from Saudi Arabia who had lived for many years in Brooklyn and south Florida,” Warren Richey defined in his distinctive article on this matter in January 15, 2017’s Christian Science Monitor. Simply earlier than the September 11 assaults, Shukrijumah vanished.

The 2003 waterboarding of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, yielded Shukrijumah’s identify. American diplomats in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, have been tipped off in 2004 to “suspect Arab extremists who have been smuggled through Mexico to the United States/Mexico border,” in line with a declassified State Division doc launched to Judicial Watch. “The confidential source stated his family member, who is a human trafficker, knows the exact whereabouts of three Arabs who are currently being hidden in Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico,” simply throughout the border from Douglas, Ariz. One in every of these three, this report states, is “likely Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, alleged to be a Saudi Arabian terrorist cell leader thought to be in Mexico.”

Shukrijumah evaded American authorities for eight years, though he was named in an eleven-count indictment in 2012 for plotting what would have been an assault by three suicide bombers on New York Metropolis’s subways. Officers grabbed the three would-be killers earlier than they blasted rush-hour commuters.

Shukrijumah reached the Afghan–Pakistani border, the place the Pakistani army fatally shot him in a 2014 raid.

• Ahmad Muhammed Dhakane was a “guerrilla fighter and human smuggler who knowingly helped move into the U.S. several potentially dangerous Somali terrorists who he believed would commit violent acts if ordered to do so,” the Texas Division of Public Security concluded. Citing federal courtroom paperwork, the Christian Science Monitor reported, “At least five of his clients were supporters or members of Al Shabab or associated Somali terror groups — and at least three of them made it into the US.” (Emphasis added.)

Federal prosecutors said in Dhakane’s sentencing memorandum: “He admits that he knowingly believed he was smuggling violent jihadists into the United States.” Dhakane advised federal brokers: “All of these individuals are ready to die for the cause.”

Dhakane, a member of the Somali terrorist group Al-Ittihad Al-Islami, furnished bogus passports to his shoppers, bribed Brazilian immigration authorities to cooperate as his clients traversed that nation en path to the U.S., and educated them to falsify asylum claims as soon as they reached America.

Dhakane was arrested on the border, in Brownsville, Texas, in March 2008, simply throughout from Matamoros, Mexico. He pressured considered one of his juvenile Somali shoppers to painting his spouse. She “told agents that [Dhakane] kept her locked away and repeatedly raped and impregnated her prior to coming to the United States,” courtroom paperwork reveal. “[Dhakane] stated that it would better his asylum chances if he had a pregnant wife.”

Dhakane pleaded responsible to mendacity on his U.S. asylum software, for which he was sentenced to 10 years in jail in April 2011.

• Abdullah Omar Fidse walked throughout a bridge over the Rio Grande, from Reynosa, Mexico, to Hidalgo, Texas, in June 2008. He requested asylum, claiming to be a Somali refugee. Whereas in custody for years as federal officers weighed his case, Fidse informed one other detainee that he supported al-Qaeda and al-Shabab. His cell-phone reminiscence card included the phone variety of Mohamed Suleiman, subsequently arrested for aiding a 2010 al-Shabab suicide-bomb assault in Kampala, Uganda, which killed 70 soccer followers.

Fidse ultimately admitted to an undercover informant: “We are terrorists.” As Todd Bensman of the Middle for Immigration Research stories, Fidse “believed all good Muslims must commit two acts of jihad a year.”

U.S. officers scotched Fidse’s asylum declare, prosecuted him for mendacity to federal brokers, and despatched him to jail for eight years.

• Anthony Joseph Tracy (a.okay.a. Yusuf Noor) was convicted on June four, 2010, of conspiring to smuggle aliens into the U.S. Tracy informed federal investigators that Cuban diplomats used his journey company in Nairobi, Kenya — Noor Providers Ltd. — to switch 272 Somalis from Kenya to Dubai to Moscow after which to Havana. From there, they traveled to Belize, transited Mexico, after which trespassed into America. One U.S. prosecutor complained that officers had “no idea who these individuals are that he assisted.” Tracy pleaded responsible to at least one rely of conspiracy to smuggle non-citizens into the U.S.

Tracy, an American citizen who turned a Muslim in jail within the 1990s, denied that he helped al-Shabab. However officers found an e-mail during which he casually wrote: “i helped a lot of Somalis and most are good but there are some who are bad and i leave them to ALLAH . . .”

• Stated Jaziri was in a automotive trunk making an attempt to enter the U.S. close to San Diego when federal officers found him on January 11, 2011. Stated stated that he had traveled from his native Tunisia to Tijuana. He then paid coyotes $5,000 to whisk him north throughout the southern frontier. France beforehand had convicted and deported Jaziri for assaulting a Muslim whom Stated discovered insufficiently religious. In 2006, Jaziri had advocated killing Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard for creating what Jaziri thought-about blasphemous drawings of the Prophet Mohammed.

• 4 unidentified male members of the Kurdish Staff’ Get together have been arrested by Border Patrol brokers in 2014. Washington has designated KWP as a terrorist group. Every of those males reportedly paid $eight,000 to be trafficked from Istanbul to Paris to Mexico Metropolis after which on to America’s southern perimeter.

• Mukhtar Ahmad and Muhammad Azeem of Gujarat, Pakistan, have been caught by Border Patrol brokers simply north of Tijuana in September 2015. The Washington Occasions reported that databases tied Ahmad to a suspected or confirmed terrorist. An unnamed overseas intelligence company warned U.S. officers about Azeem as he headed in the direction of this nation. In line with the Middle for Immigration Research, “both migrants were on U.S. terrorism watch lists.”

• Sharafat Ali Khan, a Brazil-based Pakistani human smuggler, was convicted within the U.S. in 2017 of sneaking between 25 and 99 illegals from Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan into the U.S. They traveled on foot from Brazil by way of Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico earlier than breaking into America by way of Texas and California. Khan’s shoppers included, the Washington Occasions reported, an Afghan “who authorities said was involved in a plot to conduct an attack in the U.S. or Canada and had family ties to members of the Taliban.”

Keep in mind: Everybody on this article acquired caught. What number of others efficiently penetrated America and have eluded U.S. officers? The place are they? What’s up their sleeves? No one is aware of.

Trump’s foes snort this off. Since no terrorist assault has been tied to anybody who efficiently breached the border, then clearly this concern is simply populist paranoia. Nevertheless, terrorists who stealthily crossed the border might be elevating cash for homicidal teams, radicalizing mellow Muslims at mosques, or just mendacity low till somebody rings and cryptically whispers: “Give our friends their surprise birthday cake.”

The borderphobic Left additionally shrugs this off as “only” a dozen terrorists. What’s the right variety of terrorists who ought to be free to waltz in with out permission? Recall the carnage that 19 terrorists wrought not way back. Nevertheless it took just one Muslim terrorist to shoot 14 innocents to dying and wound 22 others in San Bernardino, Calif., in December 2015. Just one such lone rat murdered 49 and maimed 53 at Pulse, an Orlando, Fla., nightclub, in June 2016. Just one Islamic extremist used a rented truck to mow down eight and injure twelve extra on Manhattan’s West Aspect Freeway in October 2017. Why let even one terrorist skip throughout the southern frontier, maybe to comply with in these blood-soaked footsteps?

Additionally, if, God forbid, a lethal assault ever have been tied to a number of terrorists who entered America by way of the U.S.–Mexico border, President Trump’s tormentors would flip 180 levels extra deftly than Olympic gymnasts. “Impeach Trump!” they might holler, spittle flying from their lips. “He never built the wall he promised, and now, scores of Americans are dead. Impeach him!”